Grass Widow
Grass Widow
Making My Way in Depression Alabama
VIOLA GOODE LIDDELL
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS Tuscaloosa
Copyright © 2004
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designer: Michele Myatt Quinn
Typeface: Bembo
"
The paper on which this book is printed meets the
minimum requirements of American National Stan-
dard for Information Science Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48 1984.
Frontispiece: Viola Goode Liddell. Courtesy of the
Viola Goode Liddell estate.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Liddell, Viola Goode, 1901
Grass widow : making my way in depression
Alabama / Viola Goode Liddell.
p. cm.
 Fire ant books.
ISBN 0-8173-5090-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Camden (Ala.) Social life and customs.
2. Liddell, Viola Goode, 1901 3. High school
teachers Alabama Camden Biography.
4. Camden (Ala.) Biography. I. Title.
F334.C25L525 2004
976.12 38 dc22
2003027671
Here I was, thirty years old, still hunting, living disembodied
in a world of which I had never been a part, off somewhere
else that was nowhere. Never alive, never attached, as if with
the severing of my umbilical cord I had found no further sus-
tenance saving my own uneasy dreams, and with one trans-
planting and pruning after another and ever set in shallower
and more barren soil, I had borne neither fruit nor foliage and
had put down roots nowhere.
 Viola Goode Liddell
Contents
Preface ix
one
Crossing Over 1
two
Charting the Way 11
three
Getting Launched 24
four
Compass Bearings 36
five
The Course 41
six
Shoals 49
seven
 There Is a Tide . . .  60
Preface
Shortly after Viola Goode Liddell s death on
May 16, 1998, one of her longtime friends, Mary H. God-
bold, contacted her son, Will L. Liddell Jr., and gave him the
very rough draft of a seven-chapter untitled manuscript, hand-
written in pencil on eighty-six pages of yellowed notebook
paper of three or four different sizes. The manuscript was in
a used manila envelope which had been sent from Moore-
Handly Hardware Company in Birmingham, Alabama, to
 Mr. W. L. Liddell, Liddell Power Co., Camden, Ala., and
bore a June 14, 1950, postmark. Mrs. Godbold said that Viola
had given her the manuscript  in recent years and had asked
her to  keep it until I ask for it.
Will and his wife, Ruth, typed and edited the manuscript
with input from Ruth s brother, Robert M. Howe III, who
suggested the title Grass Widow. The Å„nal version is given
here. Portions of this manuscript appear in Viola s book, A
Place of Springs, published by the University of Alabama Press
x Preface
in 1979, but this manuscript stands on its own as an account
of Viola s life during 1933 and 1934 as she came to Camden
to teach, and ultimately to meet and marry Will Lithgow
Liddell, Sr.
It remains uncertain when the manuscript was completed;
the 1950s appears to be the most likely time, based on the
recollections of Mrs. Godbold and the date of the postmark
on the manila envelope that held the manuscript.
Grass Widow

one
Crossing Over
Occasional whirls of devil dust danced gaily
down the rusty graveled road and zigzagged crazily across the
ashen hedgerows and into the burnt Å„elds beyond. Corn, ma-
tured early because of the drought, stood in gray-brown
patches like congregations of stringy-haired crones, arms
withered, heads wagging, whispering and gesticulating to-
gether. Pungent whiffs of a clothy odor hung in the air near
the Å„elds of cotton plants, whose prostrate leaves drooped
over the white Å„ber drooling from the bolls. A single wagon
hugged the road, groaning wearily on its way to the gin,
wobbly wheels leaving serpentine tracks in the dust; another
bounced and clapped emptily by, hurrying home to shade and
water.
A shimmering haze of heat rose from the dry earth to
meet the snowy islands of lazy clouds ballooning majestically
and hanging serenely in the brazen sky. For days they had
2 Crossing Over
come and gone, tantalizing, irritating, offering a deceptive
and immature promise of rain.
But it was September. The cotton farmers wanted it this
way. Dry and hot. Dry and hot for cotton, always dry and hot
from the planting time in April until the hoops were on the
bale in the fall. Clean white cotton upgraded to middling;
damp dirty cotton downgraded to low middling or low. The
cattlemen would have hated the drought with pastures brown,
streams dry, and water holes mud-caked, except that most of
them still grow cotton; so they, too, had to hold their peace.
Nobody in central Alabama with the sense of a dusting doodle
would complain of drought or heat from August to Novem-
ber, no matter if it sweated the last ounce of moisture and
energy out of him and sent him off suffocated with spasms
of hay fever, reeling with sunstroke or wheezing with asth-
matic Å„ts.
An early harvest . . . as if nature herself, weary of produc-
ing more and more only to have it worth less and less, wished
to have it over and done with as soon as possible. 1933. Cot-
ton, Å„ve cents a pound, cows, two cents a pound, corn, Å„fty
cents a bushel. The ultimate humiliation after years of perni-
cious anemia. Emaciated, starved, beggared, paralyzed. Hope-
less, it seemed, and helpless. For years on end the Good Lord,
apparently unmoved, had seen Å„t to watch His benighted
likenesses in the South turning on the spit; but now, since His
long petted and pampered up-easterners and cross-westerners
were praying and hollering so loud about the mess they, too,
had Å„nally gotten into, maybe He d take some notice and pass
a miracle on the whole lot of us, seeing as how half a people
could hardly keep on starving and half keep on getting rich
forever.
Crossing Over 3
True, some folks thought He had already passed the mir-
acle which His appointed prestidigitator, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, had called the New Deal, but if that was the mir-
acle it had better get to working, quick and sure, or there
would be nobody left to work it on. Though the president had
been on stage since November, spring had come before the
magician could get his legerdemain to working, and with
Congress, clumsy and slow, for an assistant, it would take more
time yet for coins pulled out of an empty hat in Washington
to trickle down to Podunk, U.S.A.
The car bumped along the rutty road, the red dirt loos-
ened by the tires swirling up and away in the backward swish
of air, until suddenly the automobile dipped down a long,
winding hill and swung onto the long, gracefully arched
Lee-Long Bridge, which crosses the Alabama River in Wil-
cox County. The tires hummed smoothly on the sleek con-
crete, now up over the river-bottom Å„elds still green below,
now onto the high main span, eighty feet above the languid
muddy water, down the opposite approach, and onto the
crunchy gravel again. Over in a ®ash, where, only a few years
before, negotiating the steep, treacherous banks and manipu-
lating the antiquated cable-guided ferry had required an hour
with luck and twice as long without.
The Alabama River! Always it had divided things divided
the county, the county seat from home, the distant past from
the recent and present, the roots of my family from its branches.
For years a barrier, now just a landmark, a directive for air-
planes, a crinkled, crooked line on a map, until it went ber-
serk and ®ed the banks, spreading out over half of creation
and wreaking its vengeance against the pillagers of its forests
and plowers of its plains. Once a highway, an artery of life,
4 Crossing Over
now the large intestine of a great state, gone sluggish with
topsoil and putrid in spots with offal from cities both large
and small.
Maybe this time I could not know, but if signs and omens
could persuade me, I would hope that it was dividing things
for me. If a miracle had to be worked, perhaps the good Lord
would not overlook me. For nobody else, unless  twere He,
could know the trouble I had seen. At least that is how it
seemed to me, not then knowing that our troubles are just the
hot tears that spill over from heaven, scalding us ornery, blind
humans here below.
My brother, who drove, was submerged in gloomy silence
as any farmer might be. Besides, we had already said all that
needed to be said. My son was quiet, contemplative, bewil-
dered or distressed perhaps, keeping his thoughts to himself.
As I looked out across the scrappy Å„elds and on to the pine
thickets beyond, I was wondering if now, at last, life would
turn real for me. Forever, it seemed, I had been looking out
across distances waiting, watching, and wondering. First as a
child, across meadows and Å„elds; later across palmetto swamps
and monotonously lapping waters; Å„nally across hazy prairies
and mountain-anchored plains. Looking, hoping for some
snatch of an old childish dream to come true. Here I was,
thirty years old, still hunting, living disembodied in a world
of which I had never been a part, off somewhere else that was
nowhere. Never alive, never attached, as if with the severing
of my umbilical cord I had found no further sustenance sav-
ing my own uneasy dreams, and with one transplanting and
pruning after another and ever set in shallower and more bar-
ren soil, I had borne neither fruit nor foliage and had put
down roots nowhere.
Maybe, at last, back in my swaddling world, whose every
Crossing Over 5
odor and sight and sound I loved, whose people were my
people, whose plight was my plight, maybe now, here, I would
come alive. Maybe this was the time, and the small county
seat of Wilcox, the little town of Camden, would be the place.
But if it was to be, I was more than dubious; I was afraid. I
had lived too close to it and heard too much about it. A back-
biting, faultńnding, politically torn, family-feuding, narrow-
minded, sanctimonious little place and me a perfect target
for trouble, just emerged from a miserable domestic debacle
and still under bans.
As the car jounced along the choppy road, I recalled that
while I was yet an infant, my oldest sister, Mary, whom we
called Mamie, had come to Camden to live as the wife of
Edwin Walker Berry, who for years had been president of
the cautious Camden National Bank still solid and sound
though thousands of similar institutions had collapsed like
spiderwebs in a storm. Although I had visited her most hap-
pily as a child once having been cut off by high water and
having to be rowed with great excitement across the big river
in a leaky skiff her subsequent visits back home through the
years had been highlighted by her relating some wild scandal,
some family rupture, some political upheaval, some salacious
gossip, some terrible crime, tragedy, or misfortune. The fact
that she herself often sided with the person maligned, abused,
or wronged was not the point which impressed me now. I
knew only that the picture I had gotten of Camden as a small
county-seat town was one of a swirling treacherous whirl-
pool of emotions and crosscurrents engulńng ńrst one and
then another of its victims, crushing them, sucking out their
vitals to cast them up Å„nally as ®otsam and derelict. Surely it
was not a fair picture. No doubt it was colored by the personal
fear that I would be one of its victims, maybe before I had
6 Crossing Over
time to slough off the horny past and grow some new skin.
If I d had my way, I would have headed in any other direction
on earth than this.
But fate had thrown me into the hopper; grasped by Å„rst
one necessity and then another, I was now being squeezed
out entirely against my wishes into this very conservative
little Black Belt community. However, going from bad to
worse had become a habit with me ours was a family that
had gone from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in a single genera-
tion, rather than the proverbial three generations, with myself
never having gotten out of shirtsleeves at all and there was
some consolation in knowing that things could hardly get
worse than they already were.
Yet, I had a feeling in spite of my sorry plight that with
every landmark passed and every turn along the way, I was at
last severing myself from unreality; consequently, my heart
raced ahead, eager to lay hold to something with body and
shape, dangerous and intolerable though it might be.
Past the river plantation of Henderson Brothers, a good
land because of long, steady improvement a lesson in indus-
try, thrift, and long-range planning with its backdrop of
virgin pine, largely untouched since Indian moccasins had
trod its sleek pungent needles hunting the turkey, deer, and
small game; past a clean, white clapboarded Negro mission
school, one of many such institutions in the Black Belt, hold-
ing aloft candles in a darkness blacker than its benefactors,
where for Negroes four months was an average school term
and twenty-Å„ve dollars a month the average teacher s salary;
past the bone-clean yards and open-shuttered shacks of Negro
tenants and sharecroppers; past the little church and cemetery
at Canton Bend, where lie bones of my great-grandparents;
Crossing Over 7
past the old redbrick pretense house, a store, a sprinkling of
homes, new and old Canton Bend.
A few more miles, a few more moments! A new day. An-
other chance. Maybe my last chance. I must not muff it. I dare
not. I would be careful, extremely careful. I would ask advice
of my older sister; what would be new under the sun, I would
take it. She would know. I would, I must, conform to the
small-town norm, however difńcult. Having grown up in the
real country, free and untrammeled, and having since lived
the life of a gypsy, life in a small town was to me an un-
known quantity. Somehow I feared its probing, its intimacy,
its judgments, its punishments.
Hung about my neck like the record of a convict on parole,
my miserable mistakes must be obliterated as far as I was able.
I would lock the past ten years in a strongbox and sink it in
some bottomless pit of my mind, never to revive or recall one
moment or one instance secreted there. It was dead. Pray
heaven it could also be forgotten by others.
A new leaf, ten years since Father, on my wedding day,
fearing my error, had pressed a hundred dollars into my hand
saying,  Keep it for coming home. You might need it. Not a
blank page, true, for past impressions had borne through, but
clean and unsmudged nonetheless if I had arrived exactly
nowhere for a decade of traveling, if I had nothing but some
gray hairs and a freckle-faced, towheaded youngster to show
for those years, I had at last, at length, and at least, acquired
something I had not started out with so long ago; I had, as
Uncle Remus would put it,  kotched a mite of good hard
sense. Might I use it to advantage! I felt I would have need
of it.
The rim of town. My destination. At last, and yet so
8 Crossing Over
quickly. Hodgepodge yards of shrubs and ®owers; fences
white picket, wire, paling; white houses with green shutters;
old colonial homes peering modestly from behind ancient
magnolias and crepe myrtles; tumbled-down houses hidden
behind shaggy trees and knotty wisteria vines; new Dutch
colonials, crisp and clean; squatty bungalows, rambling cot-
tages, added-on-to and patched-up houses, all divided by gar-
dens, fences, or weed patches. Down Canton Drive, past the
frame grade-school building and the redbrick, columned,
belfryed high-school building converted from the ancient
and sophisticated Wilcox Female Academy, past the cemetery
where stands the Confederate monument lest we forget
overlooking the living who pass rather than the dead who are
buried behind and beyond. On past the four prim Protestant
churches, all within spittin distance of one another, past the
blanched Masonic Hall, the moth-eaten hotel, Å„lling stations,
Governor Miller s kerosene-lighted home, the corrugated-
roofed picture show, to the hub of the wheel, the cluster of
business houses known as  down-town.
Here the dust, soft and white, powdered and sifted by a
thousand wheels and hooves, hung in a blinding, choking pall
churned by wagons, cars, mules, horses, and bicycles that came
to town on  Saddy  all tangling and untangling themselves
in some mysterious manner to the intermittent din of horns
and whistles, the cracking of whips, whooping to animals, and
shouting, guffawing, and loud talking among the populace.
The rectangular brick building with its four ®uted columns
and neat iron-balustraded stairways and balcony across the
front would be the courthouse. The knot of citizens sitting on
benches under the great oak tree on its lawn would be the
masculine clearinghouse for local yarn-swapping on fox rac-
ing, turkey hunting, crapshooting, or whatever sport was in
Crossing Over 9
season; for political powwows; for passing on a juicy joke or
some sizzling gossip; for looking over the passing throng
preferably feminine and preferably below the hemline
which was high enough, goodness knows; for the oozing out
of aimless palaver; for the pure-n -tee pleasure of loańng and
reminiscing; a conglomerate gathering as typical and, if not as
honorable at least as interesting, as the seat of justice itself and
as likely to last  as long as a place likes to spit when it chews
and wears its jeans by preference rather than need and refuses
to go crazy with highfalutin notions about decking out in
striped pants and cleaning its Å„nger nails and calling itself a
city.
Opposite the courthouse we stopped to get a Coke to
wash the dust from our parched throats. Three sides of the
square were lined with business houses: groceries, ready-to-
wear, hardware, post ofńce, telephone exchange, pressing shop,
barbershop, drugstores, gents furnishings, shoe repair, and
bank. Brown, white, red, smudged; board, brick, plaster, or
combination; one story or two; packed together as a child
might stack uneven multicolored blocks about a central stock-
ade. Sidewalks dirt here, concrete there, irregular, jumped
up, cut down, paper littered, spittle spattered, tobacco stained
were shaded above by rusty corrugated tin roońng sagging,
rumpled, peeled off, pulled up protruding from above the
®y-speckled, grimy, plate glass windows stuffed with adver-
tisements ancient and recent of snuff and Cardui patent medi-
cine, calendars of bathing beauties, merchandise, fragments of
faded crepe paper and string hanging heavy with ®ies.
Under the awnings sprawled scattered benches, wobbly
and whittled on, sleek and splinterless from much sitting, in-
ducements for the Negroes to sit and chat, chew and spit,
to eat and sit again, the occupants hunched apathetic and
10 Crossing Over
listless, with buying done or no money to buy. And dogs
everywhere mangy and sleek, crippled with rheumatism,
three legged, hobbling, bird dogs, hound dogs, mongrels, lean
alley dogs, garbage scavengers, table scrap pets, long haired,
short, spotted, solid, or camou®aged trotting in and out, up
and down, as if they owned the world, or stretched dead
asleep under vehicles or in spots of shade, oblivious to cars,
wagons, or populace. No lap dogs, no dogs in harness or on
leash: just dogs.
At corners, angles, or in the middle of things sat knobby
poles strung with frazzled light lines or matted telephone
wires from which hung remnants of straw and string, residue
of last spring s sparrows nests.
So this was Camden! We drove around the courthouse,
past the quaint dormer-windowed, barred redbrick jail, back
out Canton Drive and stopped across from the schoolhouse at
a modest white, front-porched, bay-windowed dwelling. A
room, a kitchenette with a tiny oil stove for cooking. A share-
the-bath in the rear. This was it.  Good folks, good neighbor-
hood, convenient, Mamie had said. All of it, for the two of
us, for seven dollars and Å„fty cents per month. That would
leave us exactly seventy-seven dollars and Å„fty cents a month
from my school salary for eight months, if school lasted that
long for food, fun, debts, and clothes. Myself, my trunk, my
boy, all my worldly possessions; my past a shambles, my fu-
ture dubious; yet, as I spread sheets on the bare mattress and
put a cloth on the kitchen table for supper, I felt, for some
unexplainable reason, that I had at last come home.

two
Charting the Way
If my reasons for being afraid of Camden
were ®imsy and imaginative before I arrived, they were soon
so thoroughly substantiated that I felt that avoiding trouble
would be about as easy as sticking one s head in the Å„re with-
out getting burnt.
My sister had not lived here for thirty years for nothing,
and my questionable state was of as much concern to her as
to myself, if not more so. Being well established and greatly
esteemed, Mamie had a reputation to uphold; thus she had a
double reason, herself and me, for seeing to it that I did not
make a fool of myself.
Fortunately for her, after ten years of being constantly re-
minded of the fact, I had at last come to see that speckle of
truth and admit it: that I had been a dunce for about as far
back as I could remember or why else should I have fallen
to such a deplorable state? Moreover, my longstanding diet of
crow served rare, tough, and unseasoned was hardly con-
12 Charting the Way
ducive to a rebellious mood. It had taken some doing, but I
was bit and bridle broke at last.
Charitable and sweet as she was about everything, Mamie,
I dare say, secretly wished that I d had the gumption or the
good luck to get a school someplace other than right under
her nose and in the middle of her life. But maybe she did not
know what I knew: this was probably the only place under
the shining moon where I could have gotten a job and here
only because of friends and friends of friends.
If the truth were known which it must not have been or
I would have never gotten a job anywhere I had just the
previous year weathered one grand Å„asco of pedagogy in a
community not far distant not far enough I feared. I state
the case now only in the hope of exonerating my actions to
some small degree, feeling that in my extremity they were
not without some justińcation.
With about half the schools of Alabama closed and most
of those operating doing so on state warrants which were
cashed for half their face value and for half sessions or little
more, the chances of my getting a school at all in that terrible
summer of 1932 were slim indeed. But, living up to my
reputation of being the biggest nuisance in the family, I had
picked the most woeful time since creation for throwing in
the sponge and coming home,  where, as Frost so aptly says,
 when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
True, the old fellow with whom I had undertaken that
Å„fteen-hundred-mile share-a-trip home from New Mexico
had intentionally done his level best to eliminate me by con-
sistently driving on the far outside edge of every one of ten
thousand or more curves, so as (he patiently explained to one
who was too dense for such tactful maneuvering) to enable
him to see what was coming from the other direction. But
Charting the Way 13
even his honest efforts to remove a good riddance from a bad
situation had failed, and there I was home again, broke as
a stepped-on eggshell, a man-child underfoot, and all my
worldly possessions packed in a steamer trunk. My folks, be-
ing about as broke as I, though still managing to wiggle along
on credit and reputation neither of which I possessed
were about as glad to see me as to see the plague, but they
were good enough not to tell me so. I soon discovered, be-
sides, that if there were one cash dollar in the whole state of
Alabama without strings attached, I would certainly not be
the person to lay hands on it.
Not if I had to depend on the old family depository of the
esteemed Camden National Bank to allow one a loan, and
surely, if they wouldn t, who would? Even though my father
had helped found the bank and my brother-in-law had been
its president for lo these many years, I was turned down cold
for the loan of a mere pittance. The matter of what security
I might offer was never even considered. I was merely told by
my elder brother-in-law that, in my predicament, a request
for a loan was too embarrassing to be put before the board;
therefore would I be so kind yes, I knew would I be so
kind as to starve or beg? How I hated, right then, that pious
tightwad of a bank. (I believe to this good day that it didn t
have any money to lend.) Thus, I learned two things for a
fact: Å„rst, that in the sight of Camden my plight was a dis-
grace and I was a  ruint woman; second, that if I couldn t
borrow money I d have to either earn some or steal some.
Not knowing anyone who possessed a penny that might
be lifted, I decided to attempt the former course. Bad as work
frightened me, starvation seemed a worse alternative; there-
fore, I decided to try to get myself a job. As much as I detested
teaching I had once ®ed the blackboard for the kitchen sink
14 Charting the Way
to come at last to consider the former not nearly as bleak as it
was painted I concluded that the only pry pole I possessed
to lever up any sort of self-support was an old dilapidated
teacher s certińcate, already ńve years lapsed and defunct. If I
could somehow rehabilitate that once scorned scrap of paper,
maybe I could squeeze into some cranny of the rickety pro-
fession. After doing a stint, ostensibly to bring my certińcate
up to date actually to satisfy the authorities I began to
belabor the teacher s market. After everybody in the family
had pulled whatever wires were available, I got a nibble over
in Marengo County.
Off I went, posthaste, to see about the opening, my accep-
tance or rejection resolving itself to what answer I could give
to the question,  Could I teach French? I grabbed the bait
and swallowed it whole. My answer was immediate and un-
equivocal.
 Yes, indeed, I could teach French. Absolutely.
Though I had had two superńcial years of French a dozen
years ago, all the  parlez-vousing I could do, or had ever
been able to do, for that matter, could be wrapped up in half
a breath. But when one has to teach French, one teaches
French.
My situation reminded me of that of my good friend
Colonel Kilpatrick, who, as a prisoner in Russia after the First
World War, was told to go out in sub-zero weather to chop
wood. Colonel Kilpatrick refused, whereupon his Russian
guard held a pistol to his head and said just two words,  Chop
wood.
 So, Colonel Kilpatrick relates,  I chopped wood.
I likewise had a pistol to my head, so I, too, chopped wood.
But I hope my friend s efforts were more fruitful than mine.
Such French as I taught might as well have been Dutch as far
Charting the Way 15
as the undergraduates were beneńted, but, incidentally, with
the patient assistance of the seniors that year, I got through
The Black Tulip and The Count of Monte Cristo, very creditably,
they said. However, bad as it was on the pupils, I still maintain
that learning French was not as necessary to them as having
a job was to me.
The sad part of it was I wasted the whole summer sweat-
ing over conjugations and vocabulary before offering myself
to a Frenchwoman in Mobile, hoping she might somehow
improve my English pronunciation of all the French l s and e s
and t s and incorporate into my ®at southern accent all those
expressive nasal twangs, grunts, and explosions that make a
Frenchman talk like a Frenchman. Before the Å„rst week was
up, my benefactor was pulling her hair out in despair; before
the second week was Å„nished, she threw up her hands in dis-
gust and quit.
 You teach French, she would wail incredulously,  when
all you know how to do is parse and conjugate? Might as well
try to build a house when all you have is paint and shingles.
 You Americans, she would continue,  go at things back-
ward. You work like mad to make money to buy gadgets to
make yourselves happy, when if you worked half as hard
learning to be happy you wouldn t need half the gadgets or
half the money to buy them.
 Now, a language. You should learn to speak it Å„rst, then
read it with expression and understanding bother the gram-
mar.
After my stammering over the simplest sentence she could
devise, she would hold her head in her hands and moan,  No,
no! I give up. I am Å„nish. Comprenez-vous? Je suis Å„ni!
 Oui, oui, Madame. I understood all right. But under-
standing her despair was no cure for what ailed me.
16 Charting the Way
Yet, withal, I might have come through with my hide
whole had I not made the mistake of trying to teach some
six-foot, two-hundred-pound, itinerant football players their
sister tongue. They soon became about as confused as I, and
since they were in school only during football season and
were accustomed to passing with marks high enough to en-
sure eligibility for the team (thus to return year after year
until they Å„nally got too crippled with rheumatism to make
the grade), they became slightly exasperated with my efforts
on their behalf. After gentle hints, such as throwing erasers
and books across the room at me, they told me out loud and
right to my face they were not going to be bothered and if I
didn t like it I could go straight to hell. Now, such forceful
language might have shocked me, to be sure, had I been un-
acquainted with that lower region, but being already there, I
could not very well be sent. In fact, I had taken rooms there
for so long I felt perfectly at home in the place.
However, with the idols of the school thinking so highly
of me and with my French going from bad to terrible and my
family affairs from desperate to hopeless, I was not surprised
at the close of the term that I was not urged to return. Thus
was added complete mortińcation to my already considerable
misery.
Heavens be praised! Camden would be spared my French.
I was up one score there, but it was going to take some come-
uppance to retrieve my reputation, if I ever had one, as a
schoolmarm. Certainly I had my private ideas as to what not
to do in order to please and to stay out of trouble, but I was
not unwilling to hear suggestions from Mamie, who knew
the Å„eld, sticks, stones and stumps; consequently, we sat down
several times and went over the ground together.
 There will be  comment,  she assured me, a guarded
Charting the Way 17
word for gossip, I assumed.  There always is, but if you can
conńne it to your past you will have made a good begin-
ning.
I listened carefully and without interrupting, having earned
no right to express an opinion, thinking abjectly of how
frightfully I had let down my whole family and of how
troubled and grieved they had been over me and for so long.
I knew that they still feared the shame of it was not yet over
and done with.
 The thing is, she continued,  not to do anything about
which a whisper of scandal or criticism could be inferred.
 Yes, I answered meekly, seeing myself headed down the
sawdust trail, willing enough for the moment to go, if that s
what it took.  But let s be specińc, I suggested,  for what s
meat in one town is poison in another.
 First your job. No loańng, and give those kids some good
ramrod discipline! Mothers tell me the school is about to go
to pot. Teachers too young, don t care working harder to get
married than to impart knowledge.
Yes. I knew. I had found out  But if the authorities ex-
pect this husband-hunting to abate they had better hire some
married teachers. Of course one had to have discipline
parents demanded it, discipline for every other mother s brat
as long as it did not touch their own winged seraphim. But
about discipline and me. Never having learned how to manage
myself very well, how was I to deliver the goods to a batch
of obstreperous youngsters? Somehow I was not tempered
to team up with that formidable ally. Every time I tried
to assume a superior pedagogic air or tried freezing up in
preparation for putting across a stern, withering denunciation,
something inside of me would laugh at myself. My eyes
must have betrayed me, for the children would catch on and
18 Charting the Way
I was sunk. How could I fake hellńre gravity over a kid s
throwing spitballs? I would like to throw some myself. And
why should I think the young generation was going to the
dogs when they laughed at the old stuffed geese like myself
who set themselves up as models to tell them what to do? But
the case was clear. I must act like a paragon of virtue and
erudition, be as dictatorial and dogmatic as the devil, and
keep a straight face while doing it.
 No running around town, or loańng in the drugstore af-
ter school, or at anytime or under any condition be seen at a
honky-tonk, Mamie went on.
That would not be difńcult, considering that my locomo-
tion would have to be done afoot and both my time and my
shoe stock were limited.
 Especially must you be extremely careful of the company
you keep. You ll be accused of doing anything your associates
might do.
I had Å„gured we would soon get down to that.  Meaning
male? I asked guardedly.
 Meaning both. Mamie was emphatic.  A female who s
talked about is a more potent person than a male.
 Then you will keep me posted as to who s who in Cam-
den?
Yes, she would, from time to time. I could not know every-
body at once, but certain ones she might mention here and
now, which she did. Seeing, however, that done with that
matter she still hesitated to fully unburden her mind, I sug-
gested that I was ready for the question.
Yes, I was right.  What do you intend to do about men?
There it was, pulled out of the closet, naked and grotesque.
Men and me. Well, I had no record to qualify myself with
sound judgment in the matter, but secretly I did have some
Charting the Way 19
ideas. However, it would hardly be modest to admit before
the game even commenced that my intentions were to turn
every likely stone I could lift for Å„nding myself a good
husband certainly I could think of no bleaker future than
remaining a schoolteacher for the rest of my days; conse-
quently, I answered deviously and rather uncertainly.
 I intend to be careful, I said.
 To be careful may not be enough, Mamie cautioned,  in
your condition.
There it was again. I knew it was bad, but saints preserve
us, was it so bad as to be called a condition? Why not a deli-
cate condition and be done with it?
 Maybe you shouldn t go out at all with men yet awhile,
she added.
 My divorce is Å„nal; my time limit for remarrying just
happens to run for another nine months, I countered gently.
 I see, she cogitated. I hoped she was thinking what I was
thinking, that at my age nine priceless months was a lot of
time to waste just sitting around behaving myself.
 But suppose I am asked to go out? I asked.
 Suppose? my sister exploded.  Whoever heard of a grass
widow not being asked to go out? And then she folded her
hands and heaved a deep sigh.  Why couldn t you have been
a sod widow instead of grass?
Yes. Certainly. Why? Dressed in widow s weeds, dewy
eyed, lonely, and alone! What a picture of sympathy and ap-
peal. Everybody would have been on my side. But what
Mamie seemed to forget was that such an advantageous status
would have required a small matter of murder on my part;
considering which, we would have to struggle along with my
being bracketed in the same obnoxious category as question-
able women, suspicioned and distrusted.
20 Charting the Way
 I ll tell you what, Mamie Å„nally suggested after think-
ing the situation over in silence.  Come to think of it, I might
say off hand that there are two men hereabouts whose invita-
tions would be safe for you to accept within a reasonable
length of time, that is, if they should ask you.
Two! I knew Mamie was conservative and careful, so I
could hardly believe that she was not joking. But she was
dead serious. What a fertile Å„eld, to be sure! Two possible
prospects and me, a woman on good behavior with half a
dozen millstones about my neck. Lucky I would be if either
of these extraordinary males ever knew I was on the face of
the earth, much less became interested in me. It did look, with
such prospects, that I d be single for quite a spell.
 Would it be too much to ask at so early a date, I ven-
tured,  as to who these two eligibles are? Naturally I must be
prepared to refuse all others.
 Well, there is Harris Matthews. He is a widower and his
wife was one of my best friends. Because he was so good
to her, I know he d be good to any woman he became inter-
ested in.
A widower. He would have a past as I did we would, in a
sense, be even to start with. I would pigeonhole the name
for future reference in case anything materialized from that
quarter.
 The other is Will Liddell.
As a young lady, I had known Will when I visited Camden
years ago; later he came over and bought some purebred
Herefords from Father to start his own herd. But he was
merely a name and a face that was all.
 I wonder why he hasn t married? I thought out loud.
 I wondered myself, Mamie confessed.  Sure, he has
Charting the Way 21
courted around for years and people have had him married a
dozen times.
 Maybe, I suggested,  he s not the marrying kind.
 Might be, Mamie agreed,  but it seems he keeps trying.
I rather think it s something else.
Something? I wondered what. Certainly if he were choosy
and hard to please I might as well cancel him out right now.
With the market ®ooded with bevies of pretty young things
to whom an eligible bachelor was the most romantic kind of
bait, I d not have a keyhole peep.
 But there could be nothing really wrong with Will,
Mamie continued.  He s too Å„ne, and his father and mother
were the dearest people who ever lived.
I knew. The Liddells had lived right across the street from
Mamie and Walker. They called them Father and Mother Lid-
dell and loved and enjoyed them and their Å„ne family of four
boys and their three wives.
 I may be wrong, but I wonder if some of the older gen-
eration haven t prejudiced their daughters against Will be-
cause his father was a Yankee? You know he came down after
the war and is still a damn Yankee to a lot of folks.
 But it s been so long Will was born here, wasn t he?
 Memories are long and bitterness is still a sweet morsel.
 But it s so unfair.
 That is beside the point. Some people must have a spigot
for venting their venom against life.
 If a Yankee thought enough of us to want to come down
here to live and make his home among us, we really ought to
feel ®attered, I was thinking aloud.
 Just say that to some people if you want to get scalped,
Mamie laughed.
22 Charting the Way
 But Will, I returned to our unńnished business,  is he a
woman hater?
 Hardly, Mamie said.  I rather think he couldn t get the
ones he wanted and the others couldn t get him. He s Scotch,
too careful, no doubt.
 And cynical, I bet. Cautious, skittish, suspicious. What a
bleak outlook! Could he perhaps be too slow, or was he too
smart? I wondered. Doubtless the latter, since I had never en-
countered one of the former types and I had known a few
of the latter halter wise and altar shy! He knew his way
around. He would be too wary even if there weren t a thou-
sand other reasons for him to never know I was alive. Any
man who had managed to stay single until he was forty
would be hard to fool into a matrimonial noose even though
lured by the most appealing bait, and, woe was me, my bait
was getting old and about gone to seed. I d better face facts
and plan for the most likely eventuality as Amos and Andy
would have said solitary reńnement.
Other matters and people we discussed at other times.
 Watch out for the scathing tongue of so and so, Mamie
would warn me.  Remember, this family doesn t get along
with that family politics, you know or this person doesn t
speak to that person ancient grudge over maybe a toothpick
or a tombstone; that family is the scum of the earth even
if they do ®y high; never invite this person without that,
they re inseparable; never criticize anybody until you know
everybody you would likely be talking to a sister, uncle, or
cousin; join a church, join a club, do what you are told to do,
behave yourself, and keep your mouth shut!
With a sister to visit and cheer me, with her advice to steer
me clear of shoals and sandbars, I was all set for Å„ne sail-
ing when about Thanksgiving time Mamie decided to have
Charting the Way 23
an operation already overdue. Late at night, one week later,
when she was thought to be progressing nicely, there was an
ominous knock at my door. I knew before I was told that
Mamie was dead.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, her life ended midstream. So much
to be done and such willing and capable hands lost to the
doing. In all my life I had really known her intimately for
only these few weeks. So happily had I looked forward to
being with her the winter long! So safe had I felt with her
nearby! Again I was alone, cut adrift. My course all too mea-
gerly charted, I would, until I got my bearings, have to travel
by faith instead of by sight. I only hoped I could be big
enough and brave enough and have sense enough to make my
choices wisely and in a manner that she would have approved.

three
Getting Launched
Sunday afternoon before school was to open
on Monday, I took myself and my child down to the Presby-
terian church for Sunday school and preaching. Mamie had
married into the Methodist Church so long ago that no one
remembered that she had once been Presbyterian; conse-
quently, it was with considerable surprise to the Presbyterian
congregation that I showed up among them. Nevertheless, I
was welcomed most warmly and made to feel at home.
Never shall I forget the strange sensation that seized me as
I walked into that lovely little gray, gracefully steepled church.
I felt awed as if I had walked into some ancient cathedral
or Greek temple. Into the sidewalls were painted, against a
gray background, Doric columns, so shaded in perspective of
height and depth that I was overcome with a surprisingly re-
alistic feeling of loftiness and grandeur. In addition, there was
painted into the rear wall an arched, vaulted corridor, so spa-
cious appearing that it gave the impression of doubling the
Getting Launched 25
size of the building. Odd and unique would hardly describe
it properly it was queer, eerie, and unreal.
This painted-in corridor behind the pulpit stretched out to
end in heavy double doors the crowning feat of the old
itinerant sign painter named West who did the work when
the building was new some seventy-Å„ve years ago. It is said
he remarked on completing the work that he should have
painted a big strawberry on the ceiling because the building
had been paid for with strawberry suppers that were put on
by the womenfolk and paid for by the men. So fascinated was
I with the end mural that I could hardly unglue my eyes from
it to note what was going on. I kept wondering what it all
represented and what was supposed to be behind those dis-
tant portals. I later learned that the same question had ob-
sessed and frightened generations of children since its incep-
tion, and possibly their suppositions correctly interpreted the
designer s obtuse imagination. Some had thought the devil
was chained there; some thought he was there unfettered
with hooves clattering, horns wagging, and tail popping, to
take charge of them if they misbehaved in the Lord s house.
One child thought monstrous, mottled snakes were kept there
in a pit, and unless he sat bolt upright and remained solemn
and attentive during both Sunday school and church service
he would be fed alive to these hideous reptiles. For him,
clammy coils and darting fangs ®itted through the interstices
of prayer and song and scriptures until he grew out of the age
of fantasy. Whether he intended it to be so or not, the old
painter s realistic and provocative work had an astringent and
chastening effect on the youth of three generations. If he
perchance set out to save souls by scaring the wits out of in-
nocent babes, he did a power of a job on this particular edi-
Å„ce of the Lord.
26 Getting Launched
(Later, in the name of progress and improvement, all of
that peculiar and painstaking work was destroyed the inside
wall torn out and replaced with modern Masonite, painted a
quiet gray-green, so soft and spring-like that youngsters who
now sit within them with all fear of devils and snakes re-
moved should be able to Å„ll their wandering minds with pic-
tures of forests and growing and living and lovely things; of
wild rabbits and grapevines and heart s ease; of ®ying with
the wind, tramping over magic greensward, climbing to the
stars playing truant from walls and benches and dead things
out into God s vibrant and mysterious cathedral of earth and
sky. At least, I hope so.)
After Sunday school was dismissed for a recess before
preaching, I found myself debouched along with the con-
gregation onto the lawn for a sort of social session where
strangers meet everyone not already met, where visitors were
greeted, and everybody chatted and attended to matters con-
cerning church, neighbors, and friends. So enthusiastic were
the newsgathering and gossiping among the womenfolk and
the politicking and cropping among the menfolk that the
ushers Å„nally had to go out and corral the stragglers and
bring them in so the choir could be seated and the preacher
get underway.
During this recess, I met one of those two extraordinary
males who Mamie said would do Will Liddell. Unfortu-
nately, Mr. Harris Matthews was a Methodist, but I could
hardly expect to be so lucky as to Å„nd both of them in the
same church. I felt more than fortunate to have gotten this
close to one of them. During preaching I got a good look at
him and a good sound of his voice, for he sat and sang in the
choir. True, his voice was better suited for calling cows
where, by the way, it got its training than singing hymns,
Getting Launched 27
but I was not as interested in his vocal skills as in his appear-
ance. His ears stood out like sails a sign of honesty, my fa-
ther always insisted nose prominent but not too prominent;
black hair, not a ®eck of gray; wide mouth, but not too
wide for a man; good gray eyes; medium height and build;
muscular and lean looking thank heaven he was not pudgy,
egg shaped, or potbellied; shovellike hands, wide and strong;
tan, sunburned not weather-beaten but weatherproof, like
the out-of-doors in which he lived and worked. He was un-
mistakably Scotch. With sideburns, kilt, and plaids he would
have looked a Highlander of the old country.
I liked the looks of him. I was glad I had decided to stick
by my Presbyterian faith instead of turning Methodist. I
could not help thinking, however, that his apparent Å„tness and
Å„neness would probably be hurdles for me rather than assets,
if I should ever have a chance to be concerned. Now if he had
been old or ugly or paunchy, or crippled, or blind, or deaf, or
dyspeptic, or miserable, I might have had a more or less even
chance with so little to offer; but, sure enough, as far as I
could see he was hale, hearty, and happy and, as for looks,
better and younger women had settled for less, as very prob-
ably I would have to do if I were lucky enough to have the
opportunity.
School opened next morning, as all schools must. The
building was old and decrepit, creaking in every worn and
frazzled seam. The teachers were either very young and as at-
tractive as their fathers and their own salaries could make
them or as old and dilapidated as Å„ve or six hundred dollars
a year for unnumbered years had made them. The children
were noisy and careless, as all children are. Some were sleek,
fat, and chic; others were bedraggled, mottled, and anemic, as
rural consolidated school children would have to be after get-
28 Getting Launched
ting roundworms and hookworms through a dozen lean
years on a diet of hog and hominy.
The children learned nothing the Å„rst week of school, but
I learned three things, one of which I tried never to forget:
you can t fool a child. Having heard of my unmarried status,
one pigtailed moppet, on coming to class for the Å„rst time,
was charitable enough to exclaim,  Why, teacher, I thought
you were going to be real old and real fat! I beamed happily
and had shed a decade or two, when some bristle-headed little
rascal slapped me down to my proper age by drawling,  Aw,
you may not be fat, but you sho are old! Even the Mary T.
Goldman s, which I had so tediously applied to my gray
streaks, had failed to fool that discerning little imp. Plagues
on the truth when it hurts like that.
The next thing I learned was that the standard of disci-
pline, which all authorities harked back to as being the crite-
rion of perfection, had been set some twenty years previously
by one Professor Hardy. Not that his methods were now
emulated or would have been tolerated had they been at-
tempted, but on every hand one was reminded of the times
when a school professor was a man s man and students and
teachers alike were mice with squeaks removed and teeth ex-
tracted.
It seems that Professor Hardy had been called into service
and given a free rein at a critical time when the authority of
parents was being openly deńed and his predecessor had been
brutally run over, trampled on, and spat upon (Å„guratively
speaking) by a group of boys who gave the only orders any
weaker schoolmate dared obey and who took orders from no
one. The boys coming from the very best families, tradi-
tionally speaking had been so long immune to correction
they had ceased to believe that hell was hot, at a time when
Getting Launched 29
the whole student body was imbued with a notion that the
process of education existed for the sole purpose for sharpen-
ing their wits and expending their efforts in concocting all
the ribaldry and devilment their brains could conceive. They
lived up to their high conception of learning by such ex-
ploits as locking the male pedagogues up in the  For Men
privies and turning them upside down; yanking rats and
switches from the heads of horrińed old maid teachers; hack-
ing away the underpinning of the main building so that a
holiday ensued for repairs; putting skunks and dead rats in
desks and water coolers and tacks on chairs; throwing Å„re-
crackers or cartridges in the potbellied stoves, loosening the
long, elbowed stovepipes so that they fell apart and choked
the class with soot and smoke; tearing up the town on dance
nights and Halloween; and taking visitors and one another
apart when things went contrary to their prescribed plans or
wishes.
Professor Hardy was the man for the hour sinewy, tough
talking, tobacco chewing, fast punching, and wise in the ways
of all ®esh, young and old alike. His edicts for both students
and teachers became laws and he furnished the teeth. No
mingling of sexes on the playground; no high school child to
be seen on the streets downtown at any time without a pass
from him or an excuse from his parents; no student or teacher
to have a date during the school week; no dancing, card play-
ing, pool shooting, or night riding whatsoever by students or
teachers; no infractions of a thousand rules of conduct on the
school grounds or in the building. His usual punishment for
disobedience was, for the boys, belting; if there was any ob-
jection he offered to take them on man to man and knock
the daylights out of them. For lesser pranks and boisterous
outbursts he used milder corrections: standing on one foot by
30 Getting Launched
the hour; holding out with straightened arm a tremendous
dictionary for ten minutes after trying it once most boys
chose a licking; bending back Å„ngers until the knees buckled
to the ®oor; lifting one out of his seat by his hair or ears;
requiring one to stay after school until dark for weeks; soli-
tary conńnement plus an ear boxing or a scathing tongue-
lashing.
Furthermore, he delegated to no one his business of sleuth,
detective, judge, jury, and jailer. He stayed on duty, on cam-
pus or off, for eighteen hours a day; boys who are now men
swear to this day that he had eyes in the back of his head
and slept with two of them open. Fighting Å„re with Å„re, he
so effectively threw the fear of the Lord into that group of
best-family boys that they subsequently hit the primrose
path, got religion and touchy consciences themselves, and be-
came deacons, elders, stewards, bank presidents, and school
board members, all so well armed with high ideals of purity,
morality, and fair play that under their in®uence the whole
town turned lily white and is still suffering to this late date
from acute goodness and propriety. Certainly not until that
bald and gray-headed bunch of men is dead and gone will
Professor Hardy cease to be the yardstick by which discipline
is measured in Camden schools.
The third thing I learned during that Å„rst week of school
was most disconcerting to say the least. Will Liddell was
courting one of the attractive young teachers, had courted
her the previous year; looking her over, I knew the jig was up
for me. I could not compete with youth, beauty, and virginity.
So I lectured myself about wishful thinking and regretted I
had not gone to the Methodist church, where Mr. Matthews
might have seen me and known I was living. But it was too
late now. Having afńliated enthusiastically with the fallers-
Getting Launched 31
from-grace, I could think of no plausible excuse that is, to
anyone except myself for swapping over to the backsliders.
I had turned my Å„rst stone and had found nothing under-
neath but a rock pile.
During that Å„rst week, too, one of the older teachers took
me aside and gave me a conńdential tip  If you want to
make a hit in this school you have got to butter up the Hen-
derson and Liddell kids. They tell me their families run the
joint. So what? I wondered.
The following Sunday I went again to church, though my
enthusiasm was down to the ebb of duty. But a schoolteacher
goes to church or she goes back home and soon I knew that
much about the ethics of the profession so I would take no
chances on a matter so simple and satisfying. I would go to
church on Sundays. Furthermore, if I wanted the good Lord
to assist me I had better stay on His side, particularly since my
state had about passed beyond the pale of human aid.
As a courtesy to all newcomers, I later learned, I was asked
that morning to come up into the choir. Since I could sing
about as well as a cow could dance, I should have had the
courtesy to refuse, but no one knew at the moment of my
oral af®iction, and I calculated, rather rapidly, that possibly the
choir would not be a bad place for me to be. I could, at least,
open and shut my mouth when I couldn t follow the notes
which would be often if they tried anything newer than
 Bringing in the Sheaves or  Love Lifted Me. What was
more important and to the point, perhaps my proximity to
Will Liddell might make him aware that I was in the land of
the living. I still had some faith in the old saying that if you
want to get run over by a freight train you should lie down
on the tracks. (Not until the choir had done its best for me
and until I heard it said none too cryptically that certain
32 Getting Launched
members of that body should take either voice lessons or poi-
son, did I relinquish that seat taken under such pretense and
held by such imposition on a polite and long-suffering con-
gregation.)
The weeks went by. The second stone I had turned seemed
as unproductive as the Å„rst and there was not a sound of
a train whistle down the track. What went on during the
weekdays, however, was sufńcient evidence as to why my
Sunday shenanigans were bearing no fruit. When the school
bell rang in the afternoons I would look out the window and
weep to see a little beat-up Chevrolet roadster waiting out-
side and in it Will Liddell; but, alas and alack, he was waiting
for the lovely young thing and not me. Waiting to take her
down to his river plantation to look over the cows and pas-
ture. I could imagine how the pastoral landscape was upper-
most in his mind or eye, or, I wondered, a cooling-off in the
sweet country air. Oh, well, I had no right to envy her I had
had my chance. I was all washed up, and I d better direct my
frazzled hopes in some other direction.
Funny thing, I rarely saw Mr. Harris Matthews, and he did
not know I existed. How long should a widow-woman persist
in such a predicament? After passing up several offers to go
out, after refusing to go to a honky-tonk, after refusing to
smoke, dance, or drink even beer, I knew I was being la-
beled by the unattached as a feather-legged ®op, a prudish
stick-in-the-mud. Once the word got around, I might as well
be desexed as far as men were concerned. Mamie had been
too cautious; she had not realized how things had changed
since she got herself a good husband, and she did not consider
all my weights and chains; she had insisted I walk a chalk line
and it was leading me where? To a classroom cell, chained
to a teacher s desk for ages on end, until weak, witless, and
Getting Launched 33
worn to a nubbin, I would eke out a rheumatic end on a pau-
per s pension from the great state of Alabama.
No not me. I wanted a good husband to take care of me.
I wanted to be pampered and petted and paid for like a
host of parasitic wives I had seen and envied and never been.
To hell with propriety! That is not so fast watch it hold
it had I, nitwit and dumb chump that I was, so soon and so
completely forgot? No saints preserve me, I could still re-
member. I would for a while walk the narrow way. I
would for a while for once do what I had been told.
But Will Liddell: funny how often I saw him maybe be-
cause I was still looking. His home was a few steps down
Canton Drive, diagonally across from Mamie s home, where
I often went. He was in and out, often passing by alone or
with his huge spotted pointer sitting up like a king beside
him on the seat of his work car or leaning against his shoul-
der, sound asleep. There he was, often clad in khakis and
boots, bossing the line crew, Å„xing a cut-in, repairing a wire,
hanging a transformer, laying a dead man (which one cus-
tomer swore should not be buried on his premises), delivering
a truck of feed, a ton of fertilizer, or a load of ice, or dressed
up in his Sunday suit and riding in his courting car going to
church or to parts unknown; every day everywhere I looked,
I saw that ubiquitous male. Often he was alone, but not often
enough; at nights while I was having a gay time correcting
themes and test papers, I wondered if  they were abroad and
where they went and what they did no, that was a bit too
personal and if it would all soon be over and she would
come to school one morning and ®ash a diamond in my eye
and settle my hash for keeps.
Yet I could not complain I still had not earned that small
privilege, and besides, I had no one to complain to but myself,
34 Getting Launched
which fact canceled out the pleasure of such an indulgence.
My life was simple it had to be on eighty dollars a month.
I was settled (even though temporarily); I was earning a liv-
ing of sorts and paying my family s way, although to make
ends meet we had to do some skimping on our middles and
our backs! I was busy. I was tired. I slept with peace, rose with
hope, and dined with faith. Not bad company but glory,
what a lonely sort!
Finally the fall rains came and purged, sweet clean, the
dust-laden air. Nights and days shook off their oppressive
heat. The smell of frying bacon and wood smoke wakened me
in the morning, and the odor of fresh milk, of quick kindling
Å„res, and biscuits browning brought me in at twilight. The
immediate past, which encased me, began to crack and peel.
My spirit began to sing again for the Å„rst time since I was
very young and had lived in a world of wondrous sights and
sounds and smells and feelings undiluted with worry and
trouble and the facts of life. Vivid, iridescent sunsets I had not
seen since I stood in another world on a lonely hill, with the
wind blowing my hair ribbons askew and billowing my short
skirts out to spread themselves like magic chameleon carpets
®ung against the sky. Spiderweb wheels, fairylike and ephem-
eral, catching the midnight mists and holding them shim-
mering in fresh morning light I saw again as I last saw them
when I trudged barefoot to school an eon ago. The odors of
scuppernongs, of rotting pears, of mown hay, of cotton, of
fodder, of meadow daisies, of goldenrod and Å„eld grasses
watered again that ancient seed sown in some inaccessible
recess of my consciousness and wakened them to joy the
simple joy of being alive and living. The cotton wagons, the
cattle trucks groaning and hurtling to market, the hum of
gins, the throb of engines came alive again and became a part
Getting Launched 35
of the throbbing of my heart, keeping time to some rhythm,
some design, some meaning for things far beyond my knowl-
edge or my power to discern. Life ebbing and ®owing, reced-
ing and rebounding, ®owing for me, as if it were coming
alive without shape or substance yet but alive at last, my-
self a part of the stream and not a worthless, derelict bit of
®otsam.

four
Compass Bearings
Just when I was rather resentfully trying to
persuade myself that too much caution was not a part of wis-
dom but of foolishness and that I should lower my sights and
compromise for less than the best, the stars were jarred loose
from their moorings by a call from Will Liddell himself.
Would I go to choir practice with him?
Would I miss?!! True, I secretly knew that my knowledge
of music was such that no amount of work would bear any
audible fruit and that the school patrons might reasonably
Å„gure that I had a lot more important things to do than sing-
ing Sunday school songs, but I had no trouble in justifying
the torture to myself and the neglect of my homework with
this windfall of having one of the only two eligible bachelors
in Camden, according to Mamie s report, hold the other side
of my hymnal. After all, I need not feel too badly, for from
what I had heard of his singing, which the congregation had
Compass Bearings 37
tolerated for twenty years, he could do with some practice as
well as I.
After the same invitation was repeated some weeks in suc-
cession, it did seem as if I might have found a nugget under
the chair bench, but as time passed, it began to appear that the
only object of these lifts to choir was, much to my chagrin
and regret, actually and really what they appeared to be
a perfectly honest effort to improve my vocal accomplish-
ments.
The other little teacher was apparently still holding her
own, and I was ńnding it not so easy to be satisńed with such
meager crumbs as I was getting in the company of a bunch
of song-singers. Not expecting the dashing and foolhardy
impetuosity of youth, however, in a man of forty, I tried to
bide my time and remember that the course of a stream is not
changed by the casting of a pebble unless perchance the
pebble looses an avalanche. Apparently, my pebble had not.
At length again, when choir practice was wearing rather
thin, fate, in the form of a man (call it luck or chance or
merely the working out of a good old Presbyterian doc-
trine), did for me what I could never have done for myself
de®ected the attentions of that lovely young lady away from
Will to such a degree that, though I did not know it until
later, Will s well-seasoned amorous bark was right then scrap-
ing a gravel bank.
Lucky for me, I had behaved myself and was in the right
place at the right time when shortly thereafter it foundered
and sank. Not knowing what was happening, however, I was
entirely ignorant of this turn of events until one day, soon
after, a friend and schoolmate of mine, Sarah Henderson,
came by to see me on very private business. She was so secre-
38 Compass Bearings
tive and so furtive I was at Å„rst alarmed and somewhat dis-
mayed.
 I came to ask you a very personal question, she whis-
pered.
My heart jumped, but not for joy. I was afraid of what she
might have on her mind. What had I done now? Friendly
advice, perhaps or maybe a warning or reprimand.
She began by putting out one Å„re already under me only
to light another.  Would you by any chance consider having
a date? she whispered.
My Å„rst relieved impulse was to say,  Thank heavens, yes,
but that would have sounded too eager and been entirely too
dangerous, for such a carte blanche might have compromised
me if the person requesting such information was not one of
those only two eligible men under God s great up-yonder.
Consequently, I faltered and hedged and Å„nally answered,
 Well, it all depends.
 A friend of mine wants to know, she added, tormenting
me and enjoying my suffering tremendously.
 Well enough, I thought,  but you have dozens of friends,
and, if I recall correctly, some of them were quite ®ames.
How would I refuse if you mention someone who wouldn t
qualify?
I stood on dangerous ground, but let the worst be I must
know.  Who in the world? I Å„nally asked, tense with the
excitement of a gambler who watches to see whether his last
coin, with chances a thousand to one against him, could pos-
sibly settle down on the one and only lucky number.
 Will Liddell, she answered.
I was stunned. Lady Luck had deserted me so long ago that
I had no faith in her, and yet it seemed I had hit the jackpot
this time. Yet I was skeptical. The payoff might be in slugs
Compass Bearings 39
instead of silver. Furthermore, one date doesn t make a mar-
riage like it used to any more than one dime makes a dol-
lar now.
If I had not been so relieved and so pleased I might
have inquired why he couldn t have come himself instead of
pulling that Miles Standish stunt, but if I had been in a po-
sition or mood to question such an extraordinary develop-
ment I might have surmised that he was fearful that I might
consider my condition to be too delicate, as yet, to go out
with men, his request indicating that he would prefer han-
dling a delayed-action bomb rather than one which might
explode in his face. How could anybody have lived through
the twenties and remained so cautious and so Victorian, I
wondered and for so long? I tried as best I could to smother
my excitement and surprise by steadying my voice sufń-
ciently to say evenly,  Well, since it s Will, you may tell him
I ll be delighted.
Maybe that was the whistle of the train way down the
track. Not in sight and still a long way off but the sound
of it played a tune in my heart. My friend would relay my
message, and then I might expect a call. Thankful I was that
all other switches were closed and my track was clear. What
if I had been sidetracked with some other affair?
I had to give up. I had to admit it Mamie had been right.
Her advice had been wise, but I must give myself one pat on
the back for having once in my life listened to another, em-
ployed a mite of patience, and observed a bit of warning.
Maybe if I continued to play a tight hand, my peace and hope
and faith would turn into something that could warm my
feet at night, build my Å„re of a morning, and eat my biscuits
at noon.
But in my elation a great sorrow for a great loss swept over
40 Compass Bearings
me. Mamie would have greatly enjoyed this development. She
would have been happy for me and for herself, and her hap-
piness would have doubled mine. What a shame she had not
lived long enough to see even this tiny green shoot from the
seed she had so dubiously planted in such unpromising soil.

five
The Course
From that day on, though I aimed to please
with my teaching whether I did or not might be judged by
some kind soul s remarking in my presence that Camden
would never have a decent school as long as the board persisted
in hiring such scatterbrained nincompoops for teachers and
thereby hold on to what small security I had until I could
obtain something more substantial, I had an interest more im-
portant which, I trust, was not unnatural. It might be said,
however, that no matter how much I was forced to neglect
one interest in favor of the other, the teaching profession
could thank me for doing my best to remove from its ranks
a most incompetent member. I was not averse to disseminat-
ing what little knowledge I could muster, but my discipline
was a shambles, and on that peg and I knew it a grade
teacher s reputation would eventually hang. If I had thought
I was busy keeping house and teaching school, I had to revise
my estimate, for now no day was long enough and I had to
42 The Course
splice it with both ends of the night for even skimpily meet-
ing my old duties plus my new.
Oftener and oftener after school the beat-up Chevrolet
roadster was waiting for me I could hardly grieve over the
other little schoolteacher, for a ®ock of young swains were
making their lives miserable waiting for a green light from
her direction. I was the one being taken down to the planta-
tion to see how fared the crops and timber of course the
crops were all laid by and the timber had not walked off in
the memory of man; nevertheless, they needed attention, to
salt the cows we fed them so much salt that fall that they
drank the river down to a trickle to putter up and down
the river in a leaky skiff with a conveniently temperamen-
tal outboard motor (was one ever invented that wasn t as
cranky as a lassoed steer?) that invariably went dead miles
upstream so that we had to drift back home. We learned the
hard way about going downstream Å„rst and having to get
back under Will s power paddling away the whole after-
noon with nothing constructive to show for it while I got
tired watching him trying so desperately hard to get me
home before night as if I had an anxious mama waiting up
for me.
During the syrup-making season, we went down nights to
oversee the job. The Negroes would be gathered around the
mill, some to attend the work at hand, some to enjoy the
good fellowship of being together, others to just sit and look
and smell and maybe taste. To one side, the old mule would be
walking wearily around his worn circuit beneath a wall of
 chaws  blanched and dry, which had gone through the
mill and been cast aside, while into a cheesecloth-covered keg
trickled the cane juice, insipidly sweet, sticky and smelling at
The Course 43
Å„rst as much of the grinders as of the cane itself. The big
furnace would be blazing and belching ®ame and black pine
smoke from the roaring Å„re under the long ®at syrup pans.
By nightfall the billowing steam rising from the bubbling
amber liquid was heavy with the heavenly odor of the nearly
made molasses, the skimmings, around which yellow jack-
ets swarmed during the day, were about all taken, and we
would add our tasting and testing to the judgment of those
more able to decide, and I would wish we could stay there all
night long.
On Saturdays, as soon as the week s accumulation of dirt
could be swept out, I got into boots and britches to go hunt-
ing. Much to my surprise and gratińcation, my young son
was often invited to go along; though it was a bit hard on me,
I felt that such a gesture indicated that the wind was blowing
in the right direction and I was pleased, knowing that our
fortunes, good or ill, were tied together. Trips of wonder and
delight they were for him who had had the sad misfortune of
spending his previous childhood years on pavement and in
apartments, to become, before too late, acquainted with a
boy s rightful heritage, the unalloyed ecstasies of hunting,
Å„shing, and camping unalloyed that is except for such ex-
quisite tortures as having a wasps nest, alive with wasps, drop
down his open blouse; or of being swelled up like a devil s
snuff ball from going on a plum and dewberry diet; or of
becoming a livid, Å„ery torch after trudging through poison
ivy barefoot; or of suffering the natural consequences of a
Waldenian supper of raw yams, green uncooked corn, and
freshly picked peanuts; or of walking home, wet and shiver-
ing, in the middle of the night after a ®ood had carried his
tent and bedding down the creek; or of losing off his line the
44 The Course
longest catńsh in the river or missing the biggest rabbit in
the swamp, or failing to bring home the fattest possum in the
 simmon tree.
The lazy river, serenely loitering along, the pastures dotted
with dozing white-faced mothers and their frisking young,
the hillsides a®ame with red-lacquered black gum, pastel-to-
Å„re maple, the straw-to-yellow hickory, the multi-mottled
sweet gum, the russet oaks, the claret-candled sumac, the
evergreen pines; the low land misty and ethereal with moss-
draped beeches and cypress; the smell of leaf mold and grasses,
the lonely far away sounds the whirring of the wind in the
pines, the cawing of a crow, the chopping of an axe and the
baying of a dog; the small, warm sounds of chirping crickets,
of harrumphing frogs, the tinkle of squirrels dropping their
nut hulls into the stillness, the friendly chatter of birds among
the tree tops; the peace, the quiet, the soft and violent beauty
of it all were overpowering debilitating every instinct of
caution and common sense while outrageously magnifying
the goodness, virtue, and urgency of that age-old and intrepid
instinct of mating recalling like a wild, primitive echo
some such remote habitat from which man must have not too
distantly nor too distinctly severed himself.
A blessing it was that all this environment, at once stimu-
lating and enervating, was old stuff to Will it did not affect
him as poignantly as it affected me, otherwise he would
surely have been less careful and particular of his behavior
and commitments. As for me, under such exotic and hypnotic
compulsion I could have fallen in love with a pine stump. It
was wise that we usually brought along a gun on the pretense
of hunting, or a lunch on the pretense of picnicking, so that
when defenses began to crumble we could kill a hawk or a
rabbit or spread our lunch on the riverbank and pretend to
The Course 45
ourselves that hunting or eating was what we had actually
come to do.
I do not know. It might have happened anyway under
some other conditions, but I like to give credit where credit
is due to one poor rodent who gave his life for the promo-
tion of my cause. Though I would have been lucky to hit the
broad side of a cow with a blunderbuss, I tried to appear to
be a good sport by shooting occasionally if the occasion
warranted such deception on my part. Birds always escaped
before I could get a gun cocked and squared away to shoot,
but I did manage to get a squirrel now and then if he sat still
long enough and was not over ten feet away. If I was lucky
enough to kill what I aimed at, however, I was not so mod-
est as my young son in explaining how it happened. When
pressed to explain a dead mockingbird in his bag of game,
he stated quite simply and convincingly that he had aimed
straight at a jaybird and the cranky old gun had just crooked
around and killed the unfortunate and forbidden mocker in-
stead.
On this particular afternoon we had planned to barbecue
our kill for supper, but since we had done more personal pros-
pecting than game hunting, sunset caught us short of food.
Realizing our predicament, Will soon ferreted out a squirrel
in a giant hickory-nut tree whose leaves had not yet fallen.
He shot and missed. The squirrel moved, however, and Will
lost sight of him. From where I was standing I could not see
him either, but noticing a small spot of sky close up dark and
solid, I knew the little animal must be there. Unable to locate
the spot himself, Will allowed me to try my hand at shooting
him out. I usually used a .22 ri®e and had never Å„red a semi-
automatic shotgun, as this gun happened to be. Will, there-
fore, thinking I knew more about guns than I did, failed to
46 The Course
show me how it worked. I got ready, aimed, and Å„red. But
since I did not know to release my trigger Å„nger, the thing
kept blasting away. The Å„rst shot jolted me; the second, so
frighteningly unexpected, knocked me down; the third, ter-
rifyingly repeated, blanked me out and sat upon me. Will
rushed to rescue the Å„rearm before I shot the whole tree
down or killed him and maybe myself, but since the muzzle
of the gun had miraculously managed to stay pointed for-
ward, he had to tackle the situation from the rear. Inciden-
tally, such a procedure necessitated the use of his arms in an
encircling maneuver so advantageous and satisfying to me
that I wondered why I had not thought of doing some such
fool thing long before.
After the commotion calmed down and we were con-
cerned with anything but the results of my marksmanship,
we heard the crackling of branches above followed by a thud
at our feet. The poor creature had given up the ghost at last
and was recalling us back to such trivial matters as life and
death and food. With three loads of shot I guess he had no
chance, and cruelly enough I was not at all grieved that he
had been a martyr to my cause, though momentarily I wished
to heaven he had lodged in the branches of that tree and
never fallen down.
Later, however, I was a martyr to his cause when we tried
to eat him. Whoever heard of eating an old granddaddy gray
squirrel as he was without previously parboiling him for half
a day? Yet we turned him over a spit a few times and made
the effort. No wonder I had to take half a box of bicarbonate
of soda before I went to bed it would have taken sulfuric
acid to dent him and had to visit the dentist next day. Not
that I would not have gladly repeated the same performance
The Course 47
or something a lot more absurd the very next minute since
my wounds were not without cause at least, I hoped not.
In spite of the good turn the little squirrel had done me, I
was not old-fashioned enough to believe that all the road-
blocks were removed or my troubles over. True, there had
been a time when, being young and spoon-fed, I might have
attached more signińcance to the incident than it deserved,
but that was eons ago when I lived in a dazzling daze of ro-
mance, innocent of the perverse ways of menfolk, constantly
in love with love and unable to perceive the ®ame apart from
the candle, when girls were shielded from the rude facts of
life and led to believe that that Å„ckle emotion d amour was
so idyllic and sacred that any object upon which it lit would
itself be immediately transformed into something sublime;
when youngsters were saturated by the vapid romances of the
day in which heroes and heroines, juxtaposed in the most
spine-tingling and compromising positions, always emerged
in alabaster chastity to be at length drawn into a fond em-
brace pledging their undying devotion, inevitably and ir-
revocably dismissed to live happily thereafter; in the day in
fact, when a decent young lady, after participating in the bliss-
ful and horrińc experience of a necking party, was bound to
consider herself either engaged a man was a cad, too, who
refused to pop the question after such goings on or, other-
wise, very badly soiled; so that girls, being so different then
than now and getting themselves kissed fairly often willing
candidates being plentiful soon found themselves entangled
in more love affairs all of them being serious than could
be properly handled, from which they at length retrieved
their reputations, salved their consciences, and put an end to
such sinful and shameful dillydallying by marrying the most
48 The Course
noble and high-minded he being the more conscience-
stricken and therefore the more willing though oftentimes
the least likely of the lot.
But that was another day a golden age ago and times
have changed. No longer could women with such impervi-
ous lily-white virtue hijack husbands for themselves, as did
Mrs. Gilbert, who, when some curious female asked how she
managed to lasso Mr. Gilbert, admitted,  Why, he caught
me in the hall one night and I let him kiss me, so he had to
marry me. Accidental, yes, and incidental, the untimely de-
mise, under such extraordinary circumstances, of the little
squirrel; but however that might have been, I hope I might be
excused for casting about in the stratosphere for the next few
days and for not keeping my mind glued to lessons or for not
protesting if the schoolchildren took a Roman holiday.

six
Shoals
If, however, such an exciting experience was
only one of the pieces of an oversized and complicated puzzle,
I would not know until more parts were assembled whether
it was a ńt or misńt. Other pieces were coming up for con-
sideration, some looking easy to place and others appearing
awkward and difńcult of solution. Some would need discard-
ing, some might be shaped and pared to Å„t, others would have
to fall in as they were, while many were still out of pocket
and not yet accounted for.
Being one of those buoyant souls who loses a battle a
thousand times before it is fought, I turned my nights into
lonely vigils of misery worrying over those unlikely and un-
known pieces of that jigsaw. I knew, moreover, that if some
of the girls before had guessed wrong somewhere, their errors
would be my good luck only if I managed to guess right. Will
was probably so set in his ways by now that if I tried to force
50 Shoals
into place some small irrelevant scrap, the whole thing was
likely to ®y to ®inders.
Womanlike, I was greatly concerned over the unlikely
state of my wardrobe. I was as naked as a fodder-stripped
cornstalk. The onset of the Depression had caught me in a
tattered state. Subsequently, I had made over and remodeled
and turned wrong side out and upside down everything I
possessed until there was nothing left to put a needle to. My
warrants the past year had been accepted for food but refused
for the wherewithal to clothe myself. Now, if I had been
Å„fteen years younger, being clothed like a lily of the Å„eld
might not have been such a serious handicap, but when a
woman gets into her thirties she needs some streamlining and
jet propulsion to help her wage a campaign in which youth
and beauty are her powerful and ubiquitous rivals. I needed
some decent clothes. The dilapidated and fuddy-duddy state
of my apparel was enough to convert a Puritan to nudism,
but I could not Å„gure how to Å„nance even one respectable
outńt.
Believing, however, that my good sisters would understand
and knowing that they were particularly interested in seeing
me decently married and out of the way, I sat myself down
and wrote each of them saying that I had heard a wolf call
and would they assist in my mobilization efforts for hunting
said big game. When they received my letters, they may not
have coined the expression, but I am sure they sang the refrain
of  Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, for in a few
days I received from hither and yon a suit, a dress, a hat, a coat,
and shoes refurbished by which, though I hardly looked like
a Hattie Carnegie model, I felt like one, to be sure. My worry
there was not entirely settled it never is with a woman
but at least it was partially palliated.
Shoals 51
Furthermore, I was greatly concerned over the paucity of
my Å„elds of conversation, the past ten years having been for
me a waste-strewn, dead-end alley. I could refer to no person,
no place, no incident of those years without tying into things
I wanted to forget and, above all, to things which might
curdle a new romance in a second. I hoped whoever might
henceforth be interested in me would never associate me with
another. There d be no digging up the dead cats I had buried
along the way.
Furthermore, I had seen more than one schoolteacher lit-
erally talk herself out of good solid matrimony by trying to
educate her admirer rather than entertain him everlastingly
raising Shakespeare from the tomb or reviving Caesar s ghost
or Å„ghting the Hundred Years War or setting forth all the Å„ne
points of pedagogy or child psychology. Thus it seemed that
both my past and my present, as talking topics, were taboo.
Luckily there were left two fertile Å„elds, fallow and stump-
free, both of which I heartily recommend to women who
are anxious to exchange what they suppose to be single-
cussedness for what they hope to be double-blessedness: man
and his affairs. Consequently, I read the Breeders Gazette and
the Southern Ruralist instead of The Atlantic Monthly and The
New Yorker and talked to Will about cows and bulls, about
lespedeza and crotalaria, about clover and vetch, about the
prices of cotton and steers and hay. Whether I already knew
or not, and whether my knowing mattered or not, I inquired
about building light lines, how the ice plant froze ice, what
were the ingredients of feed and fertilizer, how meal was
made and swapped for corn, and how the diesel engines pro-
duced electricity; Å„nally I asked all the questions I could
safely ask about Will himself, for there were a lot of things
from this quarter I needed to know.
52 Shoals
By so doing, I came upon some valuable pieces of the
puzzle, one of which, had I not discovered it, might have
proved the molehill upon which I could have stumbled and
broken my neck. Sounding like the siren of a casualty-laden
ambulance, Will conńded to me that one young lady practi-
cally removed herself from his scheme of life by trying too
diligently to correct his errors of grammar. Schoolteacher?
Right. No wonder so many female instructors are old maids
to this good day they will never learn that one should not
obviously treat a man like a child even though he be.
Sometimes Will said  ain t  not always, but too often for
this young lady s sensitive ears. But Will s ears were not ex-
actly in tune with Wooley s Handbook; consequently, when his
feelings asked for  ain t he said,  Ain t, and had no desire to
be held up for correction, please. To make matters worse, he
persisted in confusing the nominative and objective cases of
pronouns. Thus, if he whispered,  Angel eyes, I have a special
secret just for you and I, and was sidetracked by being told
that he should have said  you and me, I rather imagine the
secret was squashed then and there. And if she should call
and inquire,  Is this my little tootsie-wootsie? (or whatever
she called him) and he would answer,  It s me, only to be
®agged down and reminded that he should have said,  It is I,
I do not wonder that his ardor cooled. In fact, he swore em-
phatically that he had no intention of going back to school
again, seeing as how he was free, white, and forty, or of study-
ing grammar again at the behest of any female, young or old,
dead or alive.
I heard and heeded. Frankly, having heard of worse things
happening to a woman than listening to a faulty bit of gram-
mar, I would not monkey with that piece of the puzzle, and
if ever good came to best, I felt I could place it easily enough,
Shoals 53
especially since Uncle Remus s medium of expression was a
natural for me.
Older members of the family recall that once, as a child,
when Northern friends were present otherwise it would
have passed unnoticed I ran into the house and excitedly
announced that I had  kotch a chicken and shot  im up in
the coop, by Jesus. Mother nearly fainted and her friends
thought I was  teched in the head, but to this good day the
Negro idiom sits so glibly on my tongue that, were I to con-
fess my sins under sodium pentothal, I am sure the confession
would be made in what was my Å„rst and strongest contact
with the spoken word colloquial American Ä… la Africanus.
Strangely enough, I was worried about Will s apparent
goodness and perfection. I was frightened to death of a man
who seemed so completely and so successfully to resist evil
and embrace good. He was an absolute teetotaler and Prohi-
bitionist in good standing remaining so even after the dis-
graceful debauch of Volsteadism. He drank no spirituous liq-
uors, not at all, not even a drop in his whole lifetime, not even
beer or wine except in the communion cup and coffee
only under social compulsion and then only when weakened
to stump water or sugared and creamed to syrupy soup.
Why couldn t he have tasted liquor at least once, so he
would have known what it was like and why it was people
drank the stuff; then we could have been even, or nearer even
perhaps. Why couldn t he, when it was offered him, just say,
 No thanks, stomach ulcers, you know, or cancer or some-
thing reasonable rather than,  No thanks, I ve never tasted the
stuff, leaving me feeling foolish if I did partake alone and
foolish if I did not, not having any such record to uphold or
any apparent ailment to hide behind.
What did his family do at Christmas without a big bowl
54 Shoals
of eggnog for holding open house for neighbors and friends?
How had his mother ®avored her charlotte and sauces and
fruitcakes? With vanilla, I supposed. And how might I? Ah,
me, the answer to that one could wait.
He gambled on nothing: stock market, cotton futures,
poker not even with matches, craps, slot or pinball ma-
chines, horse racing, or the Yankees. Not even with other
folks money. Maybe that was because he had a broad Scotch
stripe in him: no frills, no fuss, no folderol; no extravagances,
no debts, no long chances; plain, square, solid. After experienc-
ing the dilemmas of a woman whose husband spent all the
money, I felt I would like the opposite variety; yet, come to
consider it, his care and caution and fear of debt might be the
very reasons he had so long refrained from speculating on the
biggest gamble in existence a wife and family. It could be. I
wondered and worried.
He did not smoke not even rabbit tobacco; neither did he
chew not even sassafras sticks; or cuss at all, as I call cussing;
or Å„sh, hunt, or play hooky from the house of the Lord on the
Sabbath day, come rain or shine, death or destruction; to cap
the climax, as far as I could Å„nd out, he had never sowed a
single wild oat with the women in all his long life. About
that, however, I could hope he might have dropped a few ac-
cidentally somewhere which no one had ever discovered, the
whereabouts and whatabouts of which he would have no rea-
son to divulge.
True, I had run away from the very antithesis of most of
these matters, but I knew I could be no more congenial with
a person who was too good than with one who was too lack-
ing in goodness. Before knowing what he was really like, I
kept reminding myself that with such a reputation Will was
bound to be pious and Å„nicky and prissy too holy and
Shoals 55
sanctińed to be real, and I was sick to death of artińcial living
and papier-mâché people. Life had to come real for me from
now on, even if it were somewhere down that lonesome road.
I could abide no more fakery, quackery or sham, be the brand
sweet or bitter.
Why, oh, why, couldn t he have raised a little hell some-
where in his past so I could feel even with him? Though my
past may have been legal it was anything but lovely, and I
felt tarnished and disillusioned and a bit cynical. Innocence,
virginity, youth, freshness prices paid for a lost cause, the
weapons most essential for waging another campaign, irre-
trievably spent. My heart sank at my great disadvantage with
a man who had behaved himself so diligently and so long for
the one woman he would someday make his wife. Somehow
the tables, which are generally turned in the other direction,
were turned against me from the start.
And why, in the name of common degradation, couldn t
he have smoked something, even if only dried moss or straw
out of a hen s nest? Having grown up in the day when it was
horrendous for a woman to smoke, and in later days not hav-
ing the wherewithal to Å„nance the diversion, I had escaped
the Å„lthy habit; lucky it was I had, for now I was back in a
corner of creation that still considered smoking by females
immodest and immoral to such a degree that daring young
ladies who did succumb to the temptation were shipped from
college, denied admittance to the teaching profession, or dis-
missed from it if the tobacco odor was detected on their
breaths. Besides being lucky professionally, I was also lucky
amorously speaking, for Will liked his women modest and
old-fashioned, and I doubt his being seriously interested in a
woman who called for a light every minute or who blew
smoke in his face every time he thought about kissing her.
56 Shoals
But, unfortunately, I had been born in a pall of smoke
cigarette, pipe, cigar, and I loved the smell of it above any
other on earth. The older, mellower, and ranker the pipe, the
staler the smoke, the more edifying the smell was to me. I
reacted to the tobacco odor like a kitten to catnip. Denied it
at home, would I be forgiven if, hypnotized by an irresistible
aroma, I so forgot myself as to trail an old pipe clear off and
away and come to realize at length that the pipe was attached
to a man?
Then, what of this keeping of the Sabbath day? Going to
church not too difńcult, being a good place to rest and day-
dream if the sermon became dreary, but whatever the groove,
the rut, the mold I would have to take a sabbatical leave
every so often to maintain my identity within myself. As for
Sunday sports, reading was good enough for me, but what if
there should be kids who wanted to hunt or Å„sh or swim?
Besides, I had heard that all the good Presbyterians hereabouts
held to the established custom of holding family prayers.
How could I? The mere thought of praying aloud and in front
of people made me goose-pimply, weak, and clammy; yet, I
guessed if I were ever lucky enough to get myself the right
husband I could at least thank the good Lord about it audibly,
since He would of necessity be my senior partner in swinging
the deal.
Furthermore, how could any man grow up in such a pro-
voking age without acquiring some sort of cussing vocabu-
lary? Except for preachers, I had never known a man who
could not on occasion turn the sky blue with vivid streaks of
swearing, and, much to my discredit, I had incorporated a few
lower region expletives into my own private monologues.
Could I rid myself of them? Maybe, but the wisdom of such
restraint would be doubtful if pressures inside me could not
Shoals 57
occasionally blow a fuse, they would be likely to blow the
power plant instead.
When my wayward family inquired as to what manner of
man Will was, I made the mistake of telling them and it
was the shocking truth how during a dance intermission,
instead of offering me a drink from a hip ®ask, he had taken
me down to the ice plant, there opening a large dairyman s
can from which we poured ourselves mugs full of bland cow s
milk. They whooped in amazement and amusement, wonder-
ing what kind of curious creature I had discovered. Such a
phenomenon, they insisted, was too good to be trusted and
they warned me to watch my step.
And work! His energy and activities were awesome that
was the Yankee in him. He never merely bossed a crew of
workers; he worked with them himself, doing the work of
half a dozen nothing too heavy, nothing too dirty, nothing
too difńcult. A characteristic expression of his fast, furious
driving was,  If you can lift your end, I can lift mine, and
that of his workers was,  Mr. Will s sperit s too fast. How
would a congenitally lazy person like myself stack up here? I
wondered.
But the worst thing about him, which I could neither for-
give nor forget unless he reformed and never relapsed, was
the fact that on occasion he voted Republican, recently cast-
ing his ballot for shame for Herbert Hoover against Al
Smith. Ah, well, that was a proof of his fallibility. He might
always be good, but he was not always right.
If I was worrying nights about the phenomenal goodness,
industry, and thrift of my suitor, I was Å„nding out by day
what he was really like; what I was Å„nding allayed my fears
and boosted my assurance. When he dropped by casually, in
boots and khakis, to bring me some more of that deep-
58 Shoals
creamed, ice-cold milk or turnips from his pet patch or a
couple of quail grimy and greasy from a hard day s work on
the engines or climbing poles, muddy or tired from an all-day
hunt, or spattered with blood from dehorning cows I knew
he was as unpretentious as an old shoe and that there was not
a grain of prissiness about him. When he shined up and took
me to a dinner or a dance, I found him as much at ease as
when picnicking or shooting squirrels down on the river
plantation. When he enjoyed a supper of waf®es and fresh
ribbon-cane syrup with me in my kitchenette more than
dinner at Antoine s, I knew he was a home-loving man and
not too hard to please. When he spent hours teaching my son
to shoot a gun or cast for bass, I knew he was generous and
unselńsh. When his eyes crinkled naturally into a smile and
his laughter came spontaneously and, oh, so often, I knew his
good humor was a natural and not a pose. He had no chips
on his shoulder, no gripes, no grudges, no glooms, so happy
hearted, in fact, that never becoming sufńciently fretted or
angry to need to cuss, he had never known its efńcacy for less
placid souls. His mother had just done a darn good job of
raising him and his father had set him such an exemplary ex-
ample that he had a devil of a lot to live up to.
Maybe he didn t smell of tobacco, but he smelled of other
masculine odors as stimulating and refreshing of leather and
horses, of fresh-turned soil, of wood smoke, maybe of sun-
shine and out-of-doors good, earthy, wholesome odors. And
for the Å„rst time in my life I discovered that the unsteeped
male had an odor all his own which was both exciting and
exhilarating to me, a female.
Far from being a goody-goody, Will was one of those rare
individuals I had ceased to believe existed except between
the covers of a book and an old book at that. Deńnitely he
Shoals 59
was too good for me, and I knew it. He was the perfectly
adjusted, the entirely conformed, the completely extroverted,
the safest, surest bet a woman could make too kind to beat
a wife, too industrious to let her starve, too solid to leave her,
too square to be unfaithful to her. I could Å„t every essential
piece of him into my part of the puzzle, but, gloom-gatherer
that I was, I began to fear that he could not and would not be
willing or able to Å„t me into his portion; me rebellious, in-
troverted, lazy, unregenerate, unpredictable, and, as one of my
friends so ®atteringly remarked, a law unto myself. Knowing
that things did not turn out for me like storybooks, feeling
that I could not be the lucky one where others so much more
likely had lost, I was afraid I was riding for a fall that would
hurt. Such good fortune simply could not be mine. Things
would never work out. They could not.
Eventually, as always, when my fancies ran away they ar-
rived at that rickety bridge that crossed the Rubicon, the one
that Will would never cross voluntarily with his eyes open,
the one skittish spot where I could never blindfold him se-
curely enough to toll him over. He might be interested, he
might be having a good time, but he would never marry a
widow a grass widow with an already made family hung
onto her shirttail. And if I ever became audacious enough to
ask myself the question,  Why not? I would be forced to
answer with another unanswerable question,  In heaven s
name, why should he?

seven
 There Is a Tide . . .
With the epidemics of whooping cough,
measles, chicken pox, and head lice subsiding, one might
know that the school year was growing old and weary of so
unnatural a process as conńning youth within walls and roofs
and ®oors. Winter was gone, if the few cold snaps that oc-
curred during the months of December, January, and Febru-
ary could be called winter, and spring had come.
The year 1934 new hope new life a stirring abroad;
cleaning time, clearing time, plowing time, planting time.
Resurrection time. Dollars had Å„nally trickled down from
Washington into the pockets of the day laborer who, though
leaning on his shovel by day perhaps, ate bread and slept less
fearfully by night; to the farmer who, though reluctantly
plowing up his cotton and slaughtering his pigs, was reassured
by a ®oor under his cash crops and promises of better things
to come; to the youth who, lifted out of vagrancy and aimless
wandering, were clothed, sheltered, fed, and paid for a bit of
 There Is a Tide . . . 61
labor and regimentation; to the Negro who, dispossessed of
health and home and daily bread, was given another chance.
A wan smile ®ickered across the face of things. Hope was
born, amid grumbling, to be sure, the traveling companion of
change; but where there is hope, spring comes. Even through
dust-streaked windowpanes one could see life outside re-
surging and rebounding. Mostly, it could be felt, for neither
brick walls, nor sooty panes, nor life, nor death, nor any other
creature could deny it access to the heart of youth or to those
in love. Only the tombstone angels and the old Confederate
soldier leaning on his musket, standing dejected and lonely on
his high pedestal in the cemetery across the road from the
school, remained cold and unknowing.
Grim, cold marble unchanging. Why not some green and
growing thing, something living and fruiting and dying, to
signify life now and life hereafter, love and beauty, and the
power and the glory of God? Yet, from these pointless, dead
reminders, none shall be spared, and not knowing, what mat-
ter? So long as a day of living has left some spring for water-
ing, some bit of food for feeding, some spot of sun for vital-
izing the lives that follow after, one should rest content.
In the schoolroom, as the hours dragged drowsily and
drearily by, the youngsters buzzed and hummed like a hive
of bees preparing to swarm, their Å„ngers itching to dig Å„sh
bait, to cut willow whistles and fashion sleek, new slingshots;
their feet Å„dgeting to be released from leather cells; their
minds restive and inattentive, wandering to hillsides and
creek banks and swimming holes. Luckily for them there
would be an hour or two between school and nightly chores
for grubbing bare toes into the soft, pungent soil; for dangling
a hook before ®icking, gold-tinted minnows; for hunting the
sweet shrub and little brown jugs; and for gathering the wild
62  There Is a Tide . . .
honeysuckle and dog violets to bring to their teacher next
morning.
By Å„ts and starts, after half a dozen false and premature
entries, spring had settled down to business. The yards and
hedgerows came alive, clothed in airy, virgin softness, tossing
fragrances along the way, now delicate and ephemeral, now
heavy and overpowering. Wisteria, having climbed porches
and trees, swung down again in festoons of lavender, grape-
like clusters, while bees busy with its nectar loosened the
blossoms to fall like a gay, tufted blanket on the ground be-
neath. The homely honeysuckle, pugnaciously twisting about
fences and neglected bushes, mingled its heavy sweetness with
the delicate odor of its sophisticated companion, the Con-
federate jasmine. Hyacinths, iris, and daffodils sprinkled the
greening lawns, primrose and daisies the meadows and road-
sides; spirea ®ung up its arched sprays like white frozen foun-
tains; nosegays of roses and small blossoming plants nestled
colorful and demure in borders and beds apart; the ancient
knobby-limbed, wax-leafed magnolias which had unfolded
their milky-bosomed blossoms over a glory that had gone
with the wind were unfolding them again over a land of new
promise.
With days lengthening and twilights lingering on into
moonrise, there was more time for loitering by the river,
for rambling in the woods, and for roaming the pastures and
exploring old landmarks and mill sites. Maybe it was no love-
lier than any other springtime, but for me it was an awaken-
ing, a rebirth, of all my cherished childhood dreams and a
renewing of all my adult wishes and faiths and hopes. So
long had it been since I had watched and seen and felt the
good earth of my homeland emerge from a dead chrysalis to
stretch her butter®y wings that I had forgotten how beautiful
 There Is a Tide . . . 63
springtime could be; so long had it been since I had moved,
disembodied and etherealized in that suspended passage be-
tween the two worlds of aloneness and togetherness, that I
had not remembered how even the least beauty, under its
magic spell, could put on such fairy loveliness.
From afar, we watched the brooding, somber hillsides soft-
ening and mottling under fresh new veils of color, a misty,
swirling study in gray and greens lime green, ice-blue
green, green of ocean spray, green of emeralds; clear, cool
greens, pale and tender; old warm greens, deep and strong.
On nearer approach the wisps and blurs took on an intricacy
of pattern and color traces of moss-draped boughs reach-
ing from great, dark trunks; an occasional spectral sycamore
skeleton; the lacy whiteness of dogwood; the soft gray rose
of redbud; the red tinge of maple; the delicate peach of crab-
apple; the snowy splash of haw and wild plum.
Finally, the hillside underfoot would dissolve into smaller,
more winsome pictures clumps of heavy-headed hydrangea,
lea®ess spidery honeysuckle and pale-blue sweet william,
maidenhair and swamp fern, springs oozing from fern-tufted
banks, waterfalls tinkling over moss-clad rocks; while far
back, and for the hunting, one might Å„nd in sheltered caves
and under damp, secluded ledges the mountain laurel and
rhododendron. Warm suns, caressing airs, lacy shades, bird-
songs by morning, Å„re®ies at dusk, mellow moons and whip-
poor-wills by night, ®eeting mists. Mystery and magic every-
where.
Each land and clime must have its own peculiar springtime
enchantment, unless perchance it has no spring at all; yet so
bewitching, so exotic, and so overpowering is springtime in
the hinterlands of Dixie that the wonder is that we frail
creatures who live in the proximity or the midst of it do
64  There Is a Tide . . .
not desert our homemade duties, forget our carefully con-
structed obligations to the social order, and go native for sev-
eral months in the year if not entirely.
You who have your rigorous winters and short, strenuous
summers, you who have the scorching winds, the dust, the
stark plain to toughen your bodies, constrain your passions,
and sharpen your wits cannot understand, unless you come
and live among us, what the long languorous springtime and
the longer, torpid summer can do for an animal, even though
he be at the top of the ladder and call himself a man. So is it
any wonder that we are a bit daffy, sentimental, tender of skin
and tender of heart, with emotions lying only skin deep, as
quick to love as to anger, both with equal intensity and un-
reasonableness and Å„ckleness? Is it any wonder that there is
an uncommon amount of lusting and lawlessness where on
every hand Nature, herself the libertine, incites the sensuous
and seductive? Is it any wonder that we are a lazy and indo-
lent lot of philanderers and loafers and idlers, when a volup-
tuous mistress strokes us and soothes us with her velvety soft-
ness and lulls us with her ease and bounty into daydreaming
and wishful thinking and wanton living?
The wonder of it was to me that with all the subtle and
intoxicating sights and sounds and smells, all the surging im-
pulses and hypnotic powers of that veteran siren pulling and
propelling forward and converging on matters concerned
with the consummation of that age-old mating instinct, Will
continued to remain reticent and noncommittal. The trouble
with him, I feared, was his ability to distinguish the differ-
ence between being in love with that primordial instinct and
being in love with a particular person. I had done my best to
confuse him into thinking they were one and the same, in-
separable, but evidently he knew better. With spring making
 There Is a Tide . . . 65
me purblind, alas, high-gravel blind, giddy-headed, witless
and well nigh undone, I began to upbraid myself for falling
victim to such weak-willed sentimentality. It did seem that
after ten years in the frying pan I would have been thor-
oughly cooked. Maybe I was at least half-baked, after all, for
slivers of doubt and misgivings began to ®y from my mind
into my heart, convincing me that I was acting the fool again.
Certainly, I had been forewarned, but for months now I
had put in nights assiduously pruning and cultivating that
fall-sprouted plant, and, being half dead from attending my
three jobs of housekeeping, teaching, and matchmaking, I was
afraid I could not hold out much longer. If something did not
break soon I would have to either hold out for another whole
year saints preserve me or give up the siege altogether.
Several times I contemplated bringing the crucial ques-
tion up for consideration myself, but I thought better of such
a highhanded, modern manner of approaching a compan-
ion of my own generation still clinging to a pretense of
modesty and reserve. I felt that he had arrived, with rather
sweet reasonableness, at the fence that marked the parting of
the ways, but the hurdle was high and treacherous at best
nobody knew it better than I and though I was eager and
willing enough to put on what blinders I could and push
gently and cajole sweetly, I hardly dared attempt a command
to jump. It might backńre, for I had discovered that Will had
a stubborn streak hidden way down deep, and if I pushed too
hard or too fast, he might balk and back off. Moreover, a
woman plays safer by granting her man the privilege of get-
ting himself into such deep, dark trouble, so that later when
he comes to regret his action, as he must at one time or an-
other, he will not be able to scream that he had been tricked.
April was slipping away when I came up against a fence of
66  There Is a Tide . . .
another kind a contract for teaching the following year, to
be either renewed or refused. Signing myself away to that
yawning ogre of a classroom would only add another danger-
ously high rail to the fence facing Will. Therefore, I decided
to offer him a look at my problem in hopes it would help him
make up his mind about the one that concerned us jointly.
On his decision hung the fate, not of one year, but perhaps
forever. If a man forty years old could not make up his mind
in seven months he probably never would, and if I was forced
to wait another year my stock would go down to zero that
I knew. The whole thing seemed to boil down to what kind
of contract I would get teaching or marriage. If the latter
were not forthcoming now, it might never be.
It was a critical moment when, as casually as was possible,
I mentioned the renewal of my teaching agreement. It was
wicked, I know, to build a Å„re under Will like that, but I had
a lot at stake. Holding my breath, I watched him scratch his
head, back his ears, swallow a time or two, and, after a couple
of false starts, close his eyes and take a ®ying leap not ex-
actly realizing what he was doing, I fear by suggesting that
probably I should not sign that contract!
That is how we got engaged; because Will had not said
the conventional thing, he could later confront me with the
fact that he had never asked me to marry him. Taking for
granted, however, that he was safely over the fence, I made
such a fuss over his advice that he forthwith and henceforth
had no doubts about the full implication of his commitment.
I fear he was a bit surprised, shocked, and baf®ed at what he
had done and of how much I had presumed, but I could not
feel too sorry for him. He was due to slip up after so many
years and so many girls. He could not say, however, that he
had not been warned. Not by me, to be sure, but by his an-
 There Is a Tide . . . 67
cient, diminutive handyman, Uncle Louie, who, concerned
by what he had seen going on, had cautioned his boss man
not once but twice:  If  n you ever let dat  oman latch on
to yo coat-tail, he prophesied,  hit ll soon be draggin de
groun , and again, when he said,  If  n you git married to dat
lady, Mr. Will, you gwinter see a heap o stars, but dey ain t
gwinter be in heben.
Well, Uncle Louie had been married for Å„fty years he
knew whereof he spoke. I knew, too, but I wasn t saying.
About the Author
Viola Jefferson Goode Liddell, the eighth of
nine children, was born at Gastonburg, in Wilcox County,
Alabama, on December 18, 1901. Except for a few years, she
spent her entire life in that county. Her father was Robert
James Goode, born in Camden, Alabama. Her mother was
Annie Lou Gaston Goode, whose father had been instrumen-
tal in the founding of the Gastonburg community, which was
named in the family s honor.
Liddell attended public school at Gastonburg in a two-
room schoolhouse her grandfather built. From there she at-
tended Judson College in Marion, Alabama, graduating with
a BA in 1922. That year she married Oxford Stroud, and from
that marriage she had one son bearing the same name. Fol-
lowing her divorce from Mr. Stroud, she taught for a year in
the public school in Linden.
In 1933, she came to Camden to teach at Wilcox County
High School. In June of 1934, she married Will Lithgow
70 About the Author
Liddell of Camden and had two children, Will Lithgow Lid-
dell Jr. and Laura Liddell Hall. She lived in Camden until her
death on May 16, 1998.
Through the years she led a busy life rearing a family as
well as teaching intermittently in the Camden public high
school. She was a member of the National League of Pen
Women, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the
Wilcox County Historical Society, for which she wrote sev-
eral papers. She was an original member of the Camden Li-
brary Board and helped organize the Camden Library. In
1980, the Alabama Federation of Women s Clubs named her
Outstanding Clubwoman of the Year. At that time, she had
been a member of the Camden Culture Club for forty-Å„ve
years. She was also active in the Presbyterian Church.
For Liddell, writing was an avocation carried out often for
her own satisfaction; yet several of her short stories were
published in a number of periodicals, including Holland s
Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Saturday Evening Post, and
Southern Literary Messenger. She also published a book-length
work of non-Å„ction, With a Southern Accent, an account of her
early life in Gastonburg, which is still in print.